Rex Smithhttps://www.timesunion.com/author/rex-smith/
https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/In-dark-days-what-might-offer-hope-15321172.php
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There's a sense among some people that we are living through America's darkest days. Maybe so. But deep troubles in our past might show us a way forward.

It's a bleak time in America, no doubt. A pandemic has killed more than 100,000 of us, and experts predict a second wave of death later this year. Tens of millions are out of work, and the trillions of dollars of government aid that have helped keep the economy from free-fall are likely to go away soon.

Brutal police tactics and systemic racism have brought protests to hundreds of cities, with violent crowds piggybacking on the peaceful demonstrators to cause destruction and chaos. Armed federal troops patrol the seat of government and police in riot gear push back protesters with gas, clubs and rubber bullets.

And the person holding the position long referred to as "the leader of the free world" pushes for a no-holds-barred military attack on his citizens, in terms that echo the world's most hated autocrats. Seemingly signaling that general officers are weighing defiance of the president's troop movement orders, the nation's top military leader issues an extraordinary statement affirming the forces' fealty to the Constitution.

Nor can we ignore the vicious tone of public dialogue that has followed Donald Trump's rise, the breakdown of legislative negotiations that hobbles our Congress and the partisanship that seems to have infected our Supreme Court. Too, even amid our domestic chaos, we cannot turn away from the reality of our failure to address the globe's greatest threat: climate change, which is likely to cause famine and political instability for generations to come.

We wonder: Can we get through this?

Maybe there are some cues for us in the response of our forebears to what they may have considered the worst...

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Sat, 6 Jun 2020 01:20:16 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Rex-Smith-Minneapolis-tragedy-is-for-us-all-to-15304496.php
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That last weekend before the coronavirus trapped us all in our homes, we were in Minneapolis, visiting old friends. We marveled at the city park system that has been rated as America's best, enjoyed the vibrant arts scene, envied the creative use of the city's riverfront. Not for nothing, it seemed, is Minneapolis often said to be America's most livable major city. If only Albany might more emulate Minneapolis, we said.

Three nights of near-riot can change a nation's perspective on a place. A cop inexplicably kneeling on a citizen's neck until he snuffs out the man's life can alter the sense that a city is filled with neighborly, decent folks.

And a president eagerly threatening to send in troops, explicitly to shoot Americans, can change any tentative consensus of what this calamity is about.

To be clear: The tragedy of Minneapolis is not the destruction of property. Looting and burning are wrong and should be punished, and order needs to be restored in Minneapolis. But that is not what ought to most concern us all right now, not least our president: The tragedy here is yet another reminder of the prevalence of racial inequity in the country, and especially how differently police interact with black and brown Americans than with whites.

After all the tragedies over all the years — after Eric Garner on Staten Island, Philando Castile in Minnesota, Michael Brown in Missouri, Sandra Bland in Texas, Freddie Gray in Maryland, and countless more names that you may never have heard or may only barely now recall, from every corner of our land — how can we still be at only this point, or how can we miss the point?

Add the name of George Floyd, a 46-year-old father of two daughters, a "gentle giant," his friends said, to those you wouldn't know absent the presence of a civilian's video camera, and a free media determined...

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Fri, 29 May 2020 23:35:51 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Rex-Smith-The-lessons-of-Rev-Onie-Beanblossom-15290154.php
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There are certain fundamental skills required of the clergy, and in the judgment of my father — memorably rendered a number of times as I was growing up — the Rev. Onie Beanblossom came up short on most.

I heard Onie Beanblossom stories whenever we might drive through the southern Indiana communities where he had served churches, or when some church leader or another wasn't performing well, in my dad's view. Such talk came around fairly often in a minister's home.

Onie Beanblossom was not an articulate man, nor a person inclined to study and learning. But he also was unfamiliar with humility and untroubled by doubt, as the stories I heard revealed.

Probably my sense of the hallmarks of leadership were partly formed in these moments. One did not aspire to be like Onie Beanblossom.

To a child, the name alone could provoke giggles. There's a hamlet called Bean Blossom in Indiana's Brown County, named for a stream where a man of that surname supposedly drowned. An ancestor of the preacher, maybe.

And Onie was, to be clear, a preacher — not a pastor or a minister or a clergyman or any other such elevated title for a job that had surely grown more complex in the years after Onie took to the pulpit as a young man with a lot to say.

He said it with passion, I heard, but not with precision.

He once announced to his flock that he was about to read "Pas-lum civ," which may have perplexed people who didn't know that Onie's Bible featured Roman numerals at the top of chapters. The scripture that day was, in fact, Psalm 104.

Right: CIV. So, you know, Onie wasn't entirely wrong there.

From the New Testament, the Reverend Beanblossom once took up a passage in which Jesus lectured on hypocrisy: "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." At the word "gnat,"...

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Sat, 23 May 2020 00:06:31 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Rex-Smith-What-s-the-tallest-pole-in-our-tent-15274255.php
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There's always the tall pole in the tent: the most intractable part of any problem, the one piece that holds up progress on all the elements of any project.

Imagine you're running a circus, and it's time to take your bigtop to the next burg. That tall pole in the center, what's keeping the tent in place, has to go before you can hit the road. It's the hardest to take down, and once you get that tallest pole out of the way, there's the next-tallest, so it becomes your problematic pole. Then there's the next. There's always a tall pole.

If you think about that metaphor in the context of our sadly dysfunctional society, you have to wonder: What's our tall pole? What's at the center of our division and rancor, our economic inequity, our seeming inability to confront great challenges like global warming and, more recently, the novel coronavirus?

If we could take down the tall pole, after all, we would be on our way forward. Yes, there would be the next-tallest poles to confront, but they're presumably easier to handle than the big one that is holding everything up.

Human progress is always uneven; history is filled with instances when the key drivers of societies have been out of sync with each other. Science and religion, for example, have often been in conflict: In the 17th century, the Catholic Church labeled Galileo a heretic, and locked up the great scientist for a decade for championing the notion that the sun, not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system.

The arts are frequently out of step with the lived experience of people in a community — either because musicians and writers and painters are pushing beyond what people are comfortable seeing and hearing, or because artists are unwilling to give up attachments to an earlier age, so their work loses relevance. Usually we catch up: Novels and poetry once...

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Sat, 16 May 2020 01:59:10 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Rex-Smith-One-mother-s-lessons-for-a-pandemic-15258225.php
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When I looked in a mirror the other day, I was startled to see my mother peering back. Maybe it's just my changing hair color. She always said I had turned her gray, so my aging look could be her revenge.

Not that vengeance was in my sweet mother's playbook. She was a turn-the-other-cheek type. In fact, her kids sometimes wished she would stick up for herself more. Aren't we always reacting to our parents' strengths and weaknesses, and living with their pathologies?

So here we are at Mother's Day weekend, and the pandemic makes even this a bit odd: Many people are separated from their families; others are unexpectedly packed in together. Either way, it makes you think more about family dynamics. Lillian Hart Smith has been gone for 30 years now, so I was delighted to discover her in my mirror.

Not all of us have a visible genetic imprint from our moms, but we all took lessons from her, both intentional and incidental. I'm almost the age now that Lillian was when I last saw and touched her — on my wedding day, when we shared a dance for the only time in our lives. So as I gaze into that mirror through eyes my heredity has made as nearsighted as hers, I think I can hear her, too.

Wash your hands, she would say. Mind you, she said that all the time when I was a kid, but in this case, I'm sure she would mean that to include an exhortation to take all the sensible advice that we're hearing from experts. Like, don't go out without a mask, and don't make unnecessary trips anywhere. You know, just do the right thing.

And then she'd say this: Be thoughtful about others. My mother advocated the Golden Rule, so she wouldn't look kindly on those who risk others' lives by not protecting us from their breath or by pushing to open society prematurely. She was too courteous to be...

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Sat, 9 May 2020 01:16:41 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Rex-Smith-Losses-felt-by-students-may-spread-to-15241667.php
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You hear a lot of would-have-been conversations these days, as in, "I would have been doing (fill in the blank) if it weren't for the coronavirus." If you dwell on it, you might feel sorry for yourself.

Like, this weekend was supposed to be alumni weekend at one of my schools, and my old friends and I — dispersed all over the country, but remembering all we shared so long ago — are mighty disappointed that our big class reunion was canceled. But, of course, the young people who are now barred from their campuses by the threat of illness are missing more. I'm sad for them.

I got a vivid sense of just what the students have lost when email this week surfaced a recording from the college where I spent my undergraduate years, a fine small university in Texas. It was made by melding dozens of voice tracks of individual student musicians, each singing alone in their homes, into a single virtual chorus.

"Fall on me like silent dew... melt my pain with thy soft strains," the young people sang, their voices rising from their isolation, blending as though they were shoulder to shoulder, breathing as one. My eyes were wet, not just because of the beauty of their performance, I realized, but for their loss.

Making music can be a deep emotional and spiritual experience. As I listened, I became once again a college musician, imagining cherished friends to my left and right. In an instant, I was struck by what today's students were forfeiting by being unable to share what for many will have been the last such intimate moment of music-making of their college years.

Certainly the pandemic has imposed greater pain on millions of people. Some have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or found their careers upended, or been left struggling to find money for food and rent. Around the world, the impact of the coronavirus will be felt for...

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Sat, 2 May 2020 02:28:03 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Warning-of-a-Roman-poet-for-America-15224851.php
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In 140 B.C., politicians leading the Roman Republic, worried about holding the allegiance of citizens outside the ranks of the elite, introduced a grain dole. Over the next few centuries, millions of bushels of wheat were imported from such places as North Africa and Sicily, part of the calculus of Roman leaders that the free food would help placate a restive urban population.

At about the same time, Rome started declaring holidays to stage elaborate games — horse races, theatrical performances, dances and the like, preceded by parades. Imbued with references to traditional deities, the pageants helped to maintain the authority of the Roman state.

These diversions eventually drew the ire of the satirical poet Juvenal — sort of the Stephen Colbert of old Rome — who believed they were necessary only because citizens had "abdicated our duties" by abandoning civic involvement. He wrote that "everything now restrains itself and actively hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

Historians may argue over whether the Roman rulers were more interested in retaining the support of the masses or in creating a social safety net for the poor, but Juvenal's phrase "bread and circuses" has endured in the lexicon of political scientists as an apt description of politicians' tricks to distract from their failures of leadership and policy.

Americans are led today by a person who, with no prior political or government experience, has nevertheless proven himself to be a master of bread-and-circuses diversion. Tragically, in the face of a grave national crisis that begs for reliance on scientific expertise, reasoned leadership and firm moral authority, Donald Trump has still failed to veer from his divisive, insensible playbook.

We should be grateful, I suppose, that the president at last recognized the peril of the novel...

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Fri, 24 Apr 2020 21:53:21 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Clothing-can-change-but-people-don-t-15208856.php
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An old friend blurted out on Facebook the other day that in Week 5 of working from home, he has gotten tired of wearing jeans.

"I can't believe I just wrote those words," he added, with tongue clearly planted firmly in cheek. "Jeans are the garment that defined my generation. Yet I find myself longing for the soft embrace of navy blue or charcoal gray. Perhaps with some pinstripes."

My friend is a lawyer of considerable accomplishment in Manhattan. You can understand how being out of uniform would be unsettling both to him and to those who know him — like seeing a priest in an aloha shirt or a rocker in a blazer. Who are you if you don't look like you?

The novel coronavirus has changed our lives in a lot of ways, the clothes we wear likely among the least important of those. But like the celebrities who are posting photos showing us their unkempt hair and gray roots, this turn away from our usual public presence offers us a chance to redefine ourselves in a way that's perhaps a bit more genuine.

Or maybe we'll all just adopt some new pretenses. I caught myself grabbing a black crewneck pullover from a drawer the other day before a Zoom meeting, and I know it's because once when I was wearing it a woman told me I looked like a movie director. Yeah, cool: Me and Scorsese. That's apparently who I wanted to be to the folks on the other end of the call.

Not that it's a good idea to totally disregard the social conventions represented in our clothing. This week police in Taneytown, a Maryland community of a few thousand people not far from the Gettysburg battlefield, issued a statement reminding residents to wear pants when checking their mailboxes. "You know who you are," the cops warned ominously.

Well, you may say, if who you are is somebody who hangs around the house in your boxers, why shouldn't you saunter to the...

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Fri, 17 Apr 2020 21:12:15 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Opportunity-for-growth-in-discomfort-15193310.php
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Life can change radically quite abruptly, as the pandemic of 2020 is showing us. Some changes will hurt us terribly. We can't protect ourselves from all that life hurls our way, but a grip on what we truly value may save us from despair when the unexpected becomes our reality.

This week I have engaged in a score of thoughtful conversations with young adults whose life plans have been upended — though they may not yet grasp how fully — by the coronavirus. I'm part of a group of editors (including my colleague Casey Seiler) interviewing candidates for early-career journalism fellowships. The lucky few selected will get two-year positions as reporters in Hearst newsrooms.

Some are college seniors who only a few weeks ago were planning to launch their careers in an economy that was bustling; some have worked for a few years but imagine a Hearst Journalism Fellowship as a way to jump into a higher tier of the profession.

Frankly, most of them will have dashed hopes, whether they win a fellowship or not. Even as digital metrics reveal that Americans are increasingly eager for news, the financial instability of many news organizations has led in recent days to more layoffs, furloughs and closings in a long-troubled news industry. Now the global economy is reeling, and recovery is likely years away. For a young person worried about financial stability, it's a terrible time to launch a journalism career.

Of course, the economic uncertainty these young journalists face isn't as unsettling as the grief of those who have lost loved ones to COVID-19, nor are their stories as tragic as those of many people who are struggling to transact their lives amid virus-induced social isolation and risk of death. None of the young people we interviewed seemed to be candidates for our pity.

But in the group interviews conducted on our...

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Fri, 10 Apr 2020 22:04:04 UThttps://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Rex-Smith-A-pot-of-tea-and-a-trio-of-helpful-15178458.php
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In the darkest days of World War II, as the Axis powers pressed toward smashing the hopes of democracy, the British government bought all the tea in the free world.

Agents of the crown cornered every available pound of tea, from every market except Japan, for distribution to troops on the front lines and for rationing to civilians at home. War-weary citizens sharing cups of hot tea, the government of Winston Churchill reasoned, would not only experience daily exercises in national unity across the class-conscious and tea-obsessed British realm, but also derive a practical benefit, because of tea's reputation for restoring calm.

There's science in the latter point, actually: Tea contains an amino acid, theanine, that is known to reduce stress. Combine that with the calming ritual of preparing tea — steeped and then stirred, with milk or black, sugar or lemon — and you understand that those clever English had a prescription for coping that didn't depend on scarce pharmaceuticals or military hardware.

Maybe there's a comparable salve for a hurting America in the current crisis, a pandemic that experts warn could disrupt lives even more significantly than global war did eight decades ago. Or perhaps in the face of that threat, we could start with embracing character traits that are represented, conveniently enough, in the acronym TEA: Tenacity. Empathy. Agility.

Considered in that way, TEA can help us, too, through looming losses and sorrows, in what promises to be a long struggle with the coronavirus.

Tenacity is a word that was heard more in the middle of the 19th century than now, maybe because pre-Industrial Revolution life was harder than it has been for us in recent years. It's a term that suggests persistence and firmness. It came to our English language from...